


Nothing Like A Little Ol' Town

by yourhandiheld



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:27:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourhandiheld/pseuds/yourhandiheld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was after the fifth world that Sora had decided he quite enjoyed Traverse Town a lot more than he did after he'd found himself passed out in a tiny alleyway in the First District.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing Like A Little Ol' Town

**Author's Note:**

> xmas write for my friend frank, with whom i can now share the joys and wonderful great fun that kingdom hearts is all about!! happy christmas ( •ॢ◡-ॢ)~♠

It was after the fifth world that Sora had decided he quite enjoyed Traverse Town a lot more than he did the first time around. This wasn't too incredible of a realization, considering how he'd found himself passed out in a tiny alleyway in the First District when he had come to all those days ago - that wasn't exactly anyone's idea of a favorable first impression.  
  
He wouldn't go so far as to say that it was his favourite world; making decisions like that tended to take a lot of thought, and Sora would rather not expend all that energy sitting down with his fingers at this temples pushing things around his head until he could decide which of the many worlds would emerge victor. It was the same as how one should not ask a person to tell them which parent was their favourite. That was a big no-no - every kid knew that. Not that Sora was a kid anymore, but it was just _common sense._  
  
Besides, Sora worried that tiny, quaint little Traverse Town, sad as it may be, wouldn't likely win in the face of verdant, endless jungle trees and upside-down rooms.  
  
He was, however, quite sure that small, cozy little Traverse Town was many leagues better than the warm and squishy belly of the whale Monstro.  
  
It was after they'd been spat out (was that it? Did the whale spit them out? Or did it sneeze? Could whales even sneeze?) that Sora decided, with a very wet shoe stamping down on the no-longer dry floor of their gummi ship, that he did not fancy going back in there. He didn't even need to argue with Donald the way he usually did when he voiced certain opinions about certain worlds. Donald had spent so long complaining about the feeling of stomach lining against the undersides of his feet that Goofy had ended up taking the wheel and warping them as far away as he could, as fast away as he could. And it was difficult, too - they were running out of fuel because of how badly Donald was sulking.  
  
They didn't count themselves up to entering the new tournament in the Coliseum smelling like gunk and sea water, so it was with grateful sighs that Sora and Donald peered out of the ship to find Goofy hovering above Traverse Town.  
  
"Wow," Sora said upon disembarking. He jumped up and down on the cobblestone, relishing the very solid sound the soles of his shoes made against them. "I never thought I'd be so happy to touch ground again." He continued to jump, clack-clacking down as gleefully as he had when they had gotten back in the ship.  
  
Goofy's laugh echoed across the more or less empty square. "A-hyuck. Sure makes you appreciate the small things, don't it?"  
  
"Sure does," Sora agreed, so happy he could kiss the ground.   
  
"Phooey," Donald complained, still upset about the stink on his clothes. He kept rubbing at it uselessly. He'd been at it the whole ride here trying to somehow magic the smell away. "Let's just get a move on."  
  
Sora and Goofy followed after him without bothering to say anything that might spark a classic Donald fit. "To where?"  
  
"The hotel! It's late and I want to get some some shut-eye and forget all about that whale."  
  
It seemed like a good enough idea. It wasn't like they slept a full ten hours every night, even though they did try their best. Goofy enjoyed a full night's sleep, Donald really loved to hang up his hammock in the gummi ship, and, well, Sora actually did need the sleep, claiming something about needing the extra help in height so he could finally catch up to Riku one day. But Sora wasn't tired yet. He was still rather excited about his newfound ability to jump a lot higher than before.

"Wait," he said, once he stamped his two feet on the cobblestone ground for the final time. "Is it okay if I meet you guys there later?"  
  
Donald gave him the eye. "Why's that?"  
  
"There's something I want to do first," Sora said. It wasn't exactly a lie. Donald stared at him some more until he turned his head and harrumphed.  
  
"Alright," he said, "But don't take too long! The last time we got separated…"  
  
Sora bit back the urge to say that it was his fault they got lost in the Deep Jungle, but after all this time, Sora had learned a lot about Donald and his temper tantrums. Oh, how he learned. "I know," he said instead, and exasperatedly added, "I promise."  
  
"Be careful, Sora!" Goofy told him cheerily. "Do ya need any munny, or - ?"  
  
Sora shook him off, having forgotten to show them all the munny he'd picked up somewhere in Monstro's throat. " - Nah, I've got plenty! See you in a bit!"  
  
And with that, he ran off, pushing the tall doors open to the third district, which was exactly when he'd found himself thinking his many thoughts about how nice Traverse Town really was. He was even disappointed in himself for not appreciating it as much the first time around. It was the only world where Donald and Goofy even let him roam around on his own. Every other world, save perhaps for the Coliseum, was just a bit too risky in their eyes, a bit too big. And while they weren't exactly Sora's babysitters, it was still their responsibility to make sure they didn't lose him.

And they were _friends_.  
  
Sora had already lost enough friends already for the pain to last him a lifetime.  
  
But he wasn't going to let those thoughts dampen his mood, not when he could finally jump really high (like _really really_ high) and even reach the top of awnings without having to get up on top of Goofy's shoulders anymore. It was thrilling. He wondered if he had maybe even grown taller in the past few days. He felt taller. Maybe that was it too.  
  
Before long, he found himself pushing through to the second district after remembering that there was never actually much to do in the third - it was so small and there weren't even any stores around there.

When he'd gotten through it, Sora was surprised to find that the alleyways were, surprisingly, devoid of any heartless. He figured it may have been because Donald and Goofy had gone into the second, seeing as how the hotel was near the Gizmo shop, and was grateful to their diligence. Still, he didn't want to go join with them already, not when he had a treasure chest to find.  
  
Much as Donald let him run around doing what he wanted most of the time, not even Donald had patience enough to follow Sora to the ends of all the worlds they landed on just to find locked chests or tiny tin boxes containing chunks of common synthesis material. Goofy didn't seem to mind, but that was Goofy after all, and Goofy did not seem to have an impatient bone in his body.    
  
But Sora liked treasure chests. He loved playing pirates back on the island with Riku, the same as any little island kid did growing up. And now that he essentially had the ultimate skeleton key, why wouldn't he go out of his way to find unlockable things?  
  
...and find unlockable things he did, right there in the second district.  
  
Though he didn't look it, Sora was a bit of a thinker (big emphasis on _a bit)_ and thought very serious things about very serious issues from time to time, like why it was that he and Donald could never time their Cures properly, which often resulted in both of them curing somebody at the same time and wasting a fair bit of magic. Or why it was that Phil wouldn't let them be crowned Heroes when they'd defeated that giant three-headed dog in the Coliseum that one time. Or again (and this one was a Very Serious Issue, as noted by the capitalized letters), why it was that someone could be so cruel as to shove puppies into treasure chests and then abandon them in hard-to-reach areas in way too many worlds.  
  
This, Sora could honestly never understand. It made him mad, because Sora was an animal person, the same as he was an Everything person (he loved a lot of things, you see), and he did not for one moment stand for this kind of cruelty.  
  
The chest in question shook a lot as he brought it down from a higher platform, wriggling in his arms as Sora attempted a sleek descent. 'Attempted' was a very appropriate word. He'd only ended up in a tangled heap on the floor, but it was alright since nobody was around to see him. His pride was spared for another day more.  
  
He opened the chest as quickly as he could and found three puppies in it, looking almost the same as every other puppy he'd found so far, and at once, Sora found himself using an embarrassing baby voice to coo at them and call them about fifty different kinds of cute pet names. (The dogs didn't seem to mind, which only encouraged him to keep going).  
  
"Heya, little guys," Sora cooed some more as he lifted them, one by one, out of the large chest that contained them. They barked at him and wagged their tiny little tails a lot, yipping around and licking at any spot of skin that they could as they tackled (puppies were very strong in numbers of three) Sora to the ground, not that Sora minded. If rescuing puppies wasn't heroic, he didn't know what was. "Are ya hungry? Want to see your mom and dad?"  
  
They licked him a lot more, which Sora took to be a yes, and this was how Sora found himself walking across the lower second district square towards the Dalmatians' house with an armful of wriggling puppies. His cheeks hurt, that was how happy he was.  
  
He wrestled the door to their home with some difficulty, ready to announce at the top of his lungs that three more puppies were finally home, only to find somebody else already sat down on the floor before him.  
  
It took Sora a moment to compute this information from his eyes to his brain.  
  
"Uh," he said, with a little awkward laugh. "Hey, Leon."  
  
It seemed that from the other side of the door, Leon was trying to do the exact same computing of information, except that he managed to look less awkward and more dignified - or was it indifferent? a very sad attempt at indifference? - about the fact that he'd been caught red-handed wrestling a happy bundle of Pongo, Lucky, Patch and a tubby Roly Poly onto the floor.  
  
"Sora," Leon said very curtly, untangling himself from the bundle of dogs. He broke eye contact only to place a few puppies carefully down on the ground before standing up in his classic Leon-pose; arms folded, eyes downcast. Sora felt himself being torn in two, partly by means of secondhand embarrassment, but also because he wanted to laugh so hard he thought he would die trying to hold it in.  
  
"I uh, found some more puppies," he said, all while thinking, _Oh no, I'm going to puke, I can't hold my laughter back anymore._  
  
"…I see."  
  
"I didn't know you were a dog person," Sora continued as he let the puppies in his arms down onto the floor, which was a dead lie because what kind of a person would give an entire house to a pair of dogs if they weren't a dog person?  
  
"I've grown to tolerate them," Leon said, just as curtly as before.  
  
To Sora, 'tolerate' just seemed like a word Leon was trying very hard to substitute for 'like' because it sounded tough. Not that there wasn't anything tough about wrestling with dogs and puppies, but it was harder now for Sora to look at Leon with shiny awe-struck little-kid eyes now that he'd caught him being mushy with dogs. Him, the once amazing Mister-In-Charge-of-Traverse-Town Leonhart.  
  
Sora wanted to say, "I knew you were especially nice to Goofy for a reason," but managed to say something more intelligent, like, "Haha yeah," or something equally as stupid.   
  
The ensuing silence was especially difficult. How could Sora look him in the eye now, Leon the-defeater-of-fourteen-year-old-boys Leonhart, how could he _possibly_.  
  
"You stink," Leon eventually said. Whether this was to dispel the awkward or just because Leon was actually offended by the smell, Sora didn't know, but he was grateful for something else to talk about and jumped on the occasion.  
  
"See," he began, "Donald, Goofy and I got swallowed up by this huge whale while we were trying to find another world - like, an actual huge whale. In space."  
  
He launched into a giant explanation of what exactly went down in Monstro's stomach, how it was wet and mushy and how Goofy used his shield as an umbrella because whales swallowed water from time to time and it _was not great_. How he'd fallen off something that might have been part of a throat trying to stab a search ghost right through the middle, and again how he'd learned to jump really high after making a round search through weird smelly body cavities for Pinocchio.  
  
What was amazing was that, for once, Leon didn't tell him to cut to the chase or get on with his point because he had things to do and places to be. He'd even managed to tell Leon about how he appreciated Traverse Town a lot more now, to which Leon made a very mild expression that could have meant he was pleased to hear it, but then again this was Leon and he was Very Hard to Read.  
  
' _But at least_ ,' Sora thought to himself, as he began to talk about the difference between the heartless _here_ and the heartless _there_ , ' _At least I don't have dirty secrets about snuggling dogs in doggy piles_.'  
  
Which was a very fair point.  
  
(It was also a new reason as to why Sora enjoyed Traverse Town a lot more than he did before. There was nothing like a good ol' dirty little secret to spice things up a bit.)


End file.
